‘No doubt,’ Dussander said, and smiled thinly. ‘But you are mixed up with me. We must live in the present, boy, not in the past of “I-should-have-nevers”. You must realize that your fate and my own are now inextricably entwined. If you “blow the horn on me”, as your saying goes, do you think I will hesitate to blow the horn on you? Seven hundred thousand died at Patin. To the world at large I am a criminal, a monster, even the butcher your scandal-rags would have me. You are an accessory to all of that, my boy. You have criminal knowledge of an illegal alien, but you have not reported it. And if I am caught, I will tell the world all about you. When the reporters put their microphones in my face, it will be your name I’ll repeat over and over again. “Todd Bowden, yes, that is his name… how long? Almost a year. He wanted to know everything… all the gooshy parts. That’s how he put it, yes: ‘All the gooshy parts’.”’
Todd’s breath had stopped. His skin appeared transparent. Dussander smiled at him. He sipped bourbon.
‘I think they will put you in jail. They may call it a reformatory, or a correctional facility — there may be a fancy name for it, like this “Quarterly Progress Report” -’ his lip curled’- but no matter what they call it, there will be bars on the windows.’
Todd wet his lips. ‘I’d call you a liar. I’d tell them I just found out. They’d believe me, not you. You just better remember that.’
Dussander’s thin smile remained. ‘I thought you told me your father would get it all out of you.’
Todd spoke slowly, as a person speaks when realization and verbalization occur simultaneously. ‘Maybe not. Maybe not this time. This isn’t just breaking a window with a rock.’
Dussander winced inwardly. He suspected that the boy’s judgement was right — with so much at stake, he might indeed be able to convince his father. After ail, when faced with such an unpleasant truth, what parent would not want to be convinced?
‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. But how are you going to explain all those books you had to read to me because poor Mr Denker is half blind? My eyes are not what they were, but I can still read fine print with my spectacles. I can prove it.’
‘I’d say you fooled me!’
‘Will you? And what reason will you be able to give for my fooling?’
‘For… for friendship. Because you were lonely.’
That, Dussander reflected, was just close enough to the truth to be believable. And once, in the beginning, the boy might have been able to bring it off. But now he was ragged; now he was coming apart in strings like a coat that has reached the end of its useful service. If a child shot off his cap pistol across the street, this boy would jump into the air and scream like a girl.
‘Your school-card will also support my side of it,’ Dussander said. ‘It was not Robinson Crusoe that caused your grades to fall down so badly, my boy, was it?’
‘Shut up, why don’t you? Just shut up about it!’
‘No,’ Dussander said. ‘I won’t shut up about it.’ He lit a cigarette, scratching the wooden match alight on the gas oven door. ‘Not until I make you see the simple truth. We are in this together, sink or swim.’ He looked at Todd through the raftering smoke, not smiling, his old, lined face reptilian. ‘I will drag you down, boy. I promise you that. If anything comes out, everything will come out. That is my promise to you.’
Todd stared at him sullenly and didn’t reply.
‘Now,’ Dussander said briskly, with the air of a man who has put a necessary unpleasantness behind him, ‘the question is, what are we going to do about this situation? Have you any ideas?’
“This will fix the report card,’ Todd said, and took a new bottle of ink eradicator from his jacket pocket. ‘About that fucking letter, I don’t know.’
Dussander looked at the ink eradicator approvingly. He had falsified a few reports of his own in his time. When the quotas had gone up to the point of fantasy… and far, far beyond. And — more like the situation they were now in -there had been the matter of the invoices… those which enumerated the spoils of war. Each week he would check the boxes of valuables, all of them to be sent back to Berlin in special train-cars that were like big Padd safes on wheels. On the side of each box was a manilla envelope, and inside the envelope there had been a verified invoice of that box’s contents. So many rings, necklaces, chokers, so many grams of gold. Dussander, however, had had his own box of valuables — not very valuable valuables, but not insignificant, either. Jades. Tourmalines. Opals. A few flawed pearls. Industrial diamonds. And when he saw an item invoiced for Berlin that caught his eye or seemed a good investment, he would remove it, replace it with an item from his own box, and use ink eradicator on the invoice, changing their item for his. He had developed into a fairly expert forger… a talent that had come in handy more than once after the war was over.